using bootcd with usb cdrw drive

[David Roundy <droundy@civet.berkeley.edu>]

Hello all.

I've been trying to use bootcd to create a bootable cdrom for my laptop,
which has a USB cdrw drive (and no other removable drive), and I have been
running into trouble booting with it.  I can burn it just fine, and put on
it a 2.4.12 kernel I compiled with USB mass storage compiled in.

When I boot off of this CD, the kernel loads just fine, but then I get a
kernel panic when it tries to mount the CDROM drive as the root partition
(the device being /dev/scd0).  :(  It claims this device doesn't exist.
However, if I use the same kernel on CD, but specify root=/dev/hda6, I can
then mount the cdrom just fine.

Is there some reason why the usb drive can't be accessed early in the boot
process? Does anyone have an idea as to how I can fix this?

David.